language

The holiday is celebrated each year on the feast day of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, librarians, and encyclopedists.

Now, I don’t know what kind of parties those crazy librarians and encyclopedists throw, but translators and interpreters around the world will certainly raise a glass to the many hardworking men and women who have contributed to our centuries-old craft.

Bible Translators

Some of the earliest, most prominent translators were Bible translators. This makes sense, of course, because the Bible was the first book to be widely printed.

St. Jerome himself was a Bible translator, responsible for translating most of the Bible into Latin.

Likewise, translating the Bible made its teachings accessible to a wider audience. This is our role as translators: to bridge communication gaps across languages, so that texts written in one language can be shared with readers of other languages.

Good Ol’ Hans

I must confess… I have a favorite Bible translator, and it’s not St. Jerome.

His name is Hans Tausen (1494-1561). He studied under Martin Luther in Wittenberg and went on to lead the Danish Reformation. He was also a well-educated language scholar, fluent in both Greek and Hebrew.

In 1535, Tausen translated the first five books of the Old Testament (known as the Pentateuch) from Hebrew to Danish. According to The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages, Volume 2, his translation “has been praised for its vigorous, bold and popular, strikingly vivid style, with rich, often genuinely Danish vocabulary; it has been judged as the most distinctively Danish Bible translation before modern times.” (Note: The image above comes from my copy of a 1932 reprint of Tausen’s translation, titled HansTausens Oversættelse af De fem Mosebøger.)

Hans Tausen is also my 13th great-grandfather. And while simple mathematics show that each of us has thousands of ancestors that far back, it feels pretty cool to have genealogical proof of direct lineage to a badass religious reformer and translator. Or as we lovingly call him in our family… Good Ol’ Hans.

Photo: me (far left) with family in front of a statue of Hans Tausen in Ribe, Denmark, in May 1998

I like to think that some strand of his DNA that predisposes linguistic talent has been passed down over the years. As if translation is our 500-year-old family business. 🙂

In any case, this Friday, on International Translation Day, I’ll be celebrating my great-great-great-….-grandfather, as well as the countless other translators and interpreters who have devoted hours of study to languages and other fields in order to bridge cultures and expand our understanding of others.

It can be fun to laugh at examples of bad translations on the Internet. A poorly translated menu in China. A nonsensical sign in Russia. Indeed, if you have ever traveled abroad, you yourself may have encountered some poorly translated texts in brochures, menus, or other texts.

Harmless, right? Not always….

In 2009, HSBC Bank spent a hefty $10 million to correct a mistranslation of its “Assume Nothing” tagline, which had been wrongly translated into other languages as “Do Nothing”. The company opted to change its tagline to the more translation-friendly “The world’s private bank”.

The Swedish company Electrolux famously blundered when introducing its “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux” marketing campaign in the United States, where “sucks” is slang for “bad” or “unreliable”.

In 1980, an 18-year-old man was admitted to a Florida hospital in a coma. His family and friends, who could only speak Spanish, described him as being “intoxicado”. A bilingual hospital staff member understood this as meaning that the man was intoxicated, and doctors then proceeded to treat him as if he had a drug overdose. However, he was actually experiencing food poisoning (another meaning of “intoxicado”). The misdiagnosis and improper treatment left him quadriplegic and landed the hospital with a $71 million malpractice settlement.

Of course, these three situations could have been avoided with the help of a professional translator or interpreter. Paying a professional upfront saves big money in the long term.

Translation mistakes in advertising are highly visible. But what about mistakes in crucial financial reporting by international banks or in the drug development process by pharmaceutical companies? The wrong terminology can add up to huge losses for the company.

Doing translation right the first time can also protect a company against damage to its brand reputation. Potential customers may be turned away from a poorly translated brochure or website and choose instead to spend their money with companies whose brands appear more professional.

How do you put a price on that?

It’s understandable to want to keep costs low in your business, especially if you’re a startup operating with limited funds. But when you’re doing business internationally, there are simply no good shortcuts for professional translation services. A good-quality translation can have a ripple effect on your international growth, leading to a stronger brand reputation in your foreign markets and higher profits for your company.

Wait! Before you go….

Can you spot the mistake in the image above?? Let me know in the comments below!

In the early 2000s, the Human Genome Project was making headlines, with its ambitious endeavor to map the individual genes that make up the human genome. Geneticist J. Craig Venter, one of the driving forces behind the Human Genome Project, delivered the commencement speech at Georgetown University in 2002, the year I graduated in computational linguistics. I remember listening to him describe the daunting challenge of identifying the thousands of genes in the human genome. It was truly inspiring to hear his first-hand account of this major scientific achievement.

Talk about innovation!

Since that time, researchers have gained a tremendous understanding of human genes. They’ve even mapped the genomes of other animal species. Including Neanderthals.

When we think of Neanderthals, we think of primitive grunting cavemen who died out against the intellectually superior homo sapiens (us). Neanderthals were such… Neanderthals!

Or were they?? Evidence discovered in recent years suggests that Neanderthals may have had complex language after all, far from the grunts we give them credit for.

Neanderthals were such… Neanderthals! Or were they??

Firstly, DNA evidence paints a complex picture of the Neanderthals. (It’s way more than I can cover here, but look it up. Seriously. Or check out NOVA’s “Decoding Neanderthals” on Netflix or YouTube.) For one thing, Neanderthal DNA has the same FOXP2 gene as humans. This gene, colloquially known as the language gene, is what allows us humans to use language while other primates cannot. That’s a big deal.

Secondly, Neanderthal bones give credence to the theory of complex Neanderthal language. A Neanderthal skeleton discovered in 1989 has a hyoid bone positioned as in humans. The hyoid bone supports the root of the tongue when speaking. By contrast, the hyoid bone in non-human primates is positioned in such a way that it does not allow vocalized speech.

Lastly — and what I believe is the strongest evidence of complex language in Neanderthals — comes from the very recent discovery of interbreeding between Neanderthals and homo sapiens. Researchers have found that Neanderthal DNA makes up an average of 1-4% of the DNA of non-African modern humans.

What??

This tells us that the interbreeding between Neanderthals and homo sapiens was extremely common at the time, at least in some parts of the world. Researchers suggest it went on for some 5,000 years. The Neanderthals didn’t go extinct; they were absorbed into our species!

Alright, so where does language play into this? Think about it. There had to be some communication involved. Ice-breakers. Relationships. Cheap pickup lines at caveman bars.

That point is…. Neanderthals were biologically equipped for language, just like us. Now, given the sociological factor of 5,000 years of interbreeding, it is entirely reasonable to believe that their language was every bit as rich as that of the homo sapiens of the time. To take it a step further, their languages were likely the SAME.